Stay Woke: Black Youth Activists' Utilization of Political Education

• In Event: 15.033 - Black Youth Activists' Political Education: Developing Critical Politics in the Absence of a "Truth Era"

Abstract

Black activism has been used in many forms such as fighting for more equitable schools, community development programs such as within the Black Panther Party, and for their inclusion within higher education systems as it relates to their enrollment numbers and Black Studies programs (Blassingame & Fischer 1971, Ginwright 2010b, Rooks 2006). Youth activism, in particular, is unique in that “adolescents’ battles to publicly weigh in on social and political issues require that they transgress the line between citizens-in-training and actual political actors with voices and presence” (Gordon, 2007, p. 636). Their stage in life is of importance as Black youth activists are in development both in their consciousness and adolescence, and are uniquely positioned to advocate for changes that will positively influence their current conditions (Gordon, 2007). Due to these understandings, this ethnographic case study explores how Black youth activists in a local community based organization (CBO) exercise their political education to both influence their peers and to influence educational policy in their urban city context.
In this study, Black youth speak to the deliberateness of their inequitable education and root this understanding in race and power. Ginwright (2010b) in his ethnographic work about Black youth activism and radical healing argued that “when black youth are conscious of the root causes of the problems they face, they act in profound ways to resist and transform the issues they view as unjust” (p.8). Not only is this evident, for instance, in youth activist spaces such as canvassing their communities about issues they advocate for, but also in the spaces where they are trying to transform the environment or education. Research has shown that once Black youth activists garner a critical consciousness they utilize this criticality to resist and often discuss the intersections of race and power (Diemer & Li 2011, Ginwright 2010a, Ginwright 2007, Hope et al. 2015). In another use of critical consciousness, Black youth activists employ a resistance in which they are able to speak to their inequitable education environments and also are action-oriented where they utilize their critical consciousness to inform how they resist through their activism.
This work was informed by interviews with five Black youth activists and participant observations of their larger bi-weekly youth organizing meetings from a CBO I have been working with for the past two years. This particular paper is guided by the question of, how are Black youth activists making sense of their inequitable education and how is this informed by their political education acquired in their local CBO? The findings have implications for how youth organizing spaces could inform education policies in ways that could be more effective in acquiring an equitable education in communities where it is the most disparate (Checkoway & Richards-Schuester 2006; Fine, Torre, Burns, & Payne 2007, Hope, Skoog, and Jagers 2015).

Author

• Naomi Mae W., University of Michigan - Ann Arbor